Plenty of things going on in March... As ever, the hosting industry forges on and in its wake plenty of news items for your perusal and pleasure. What follows is a review of some of March's key news items...
Lots to celebrate in March for ServePath and HostColor.com who marked 5 years in hosting - the latter offering a promotion to the customers who stayed with them throughout. Hostirian also celebrated the expansion of its Data Center, Hurricane Electric opened a new co-location facility and GoDaddy.com announced sponsorship for the PodShow Podcast Network. March also saw a few people getting mighty peeved at ICANN who approved a controversial agreement with VeriSign which GoDaddy.com slammed as being unfair and companies like BulkRegister voiced "strong opposition" towards. The whole affair brewed over into GoDaddy.com and other providers submitting a petition to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
March saw the release of a report from Europe that made interesting reading -- apparently Managed Services match web hosting and co-location revenues on the continent, which might have provided a wake up call for a few people, as might the news that Microsoft adverts might lead to free web hosting... YIKES!
As with every month, new players emerged in the market... Newtek Business Services, Inc. kicked off web hosting and ServePath launched its UpStream Networks spin-off. March was also a month for attention seeking, and Globat did that successfully with its continuation of a range of nutty sponsorships. In March this included sponsoring the birth of a child, buying a man's head, and, probably more obviously, sponsoring the St. Patrick's Day gynecological visit of a web celebrity... Getting a bit of a tradition amongst web celebs those St. Patrick's Day gynecological visits so I'm a bit blase about this one.. Hostway, however, went a more traditional route towards getting some recognition by donating web hosting to a dance marathon web site.
March's magic numbers were 10,000, 50,000 and 400,000, representing the number of websites hosted respectively by UnitedHosting, StartLogic and IPOWER. March also saw a number of acquisitions and partnerships - CFDynamics entered into an agreement with Dell Computers for web hosting servers, IceWEB acquired PatriotNet and 300 web hosting customers, CFDynamics partnered with TemplateMonster.com, 2Macs Web Design and Hosting selected E-onlinedata, and Canada Web Hosting partnered with Syncsort, Inc. to improve recovery services. In addition, the purchase of Opobox, Inc. offered United Online, Inc. a distribution channel to market web hosting.
Web hosts ignored the ides of March and set a number of promotions in motion... EIRCA Internet Solutions set of a countdown to 2007's DAYTONA 500, RegisterFly.com launched a new "coupon" promotion, Host Color decided to sponsor bloggers, and Globat launched its GloFlex affiliate program. As with most months, a number of web hosts gained awards. In particular DiscountASP.NET became .NET Developer's Journal readers' choice and 1&1 Internet, Inc. got Microsoft gold. Meanwhile in the reseller world X9 Web Hosting restructured its reseller plans while Exabytes enhanced theirs, and InetServices launched a new program.
As ever, masses of companies announced new hosting plans for their customers. Freedom List launched free hosting, as did SiteGround, Prohosters launched managed VPS hosting alongside Got Web Host and RackForce, Re-invent added ASP.NET 2.0 commerce starter kits to its products, WestHost had new plans to offer, and Easyspace launched an SME solution. And of course, more hosts offered more and more and more in their plans... JBW Series Hosting Solution boosted their plans, AIT offered "Drive-Thru Hosting" with a content manager, eXostream released a new control panel, MySiteSpace offered new dedicated IP addresses and MochaHost.com announced a new site builder and updated power tools. In addition, Gearworx LLC launched Microsoft SQL 2005, Apollo Hosting deployed a new site building tool, AIT added Hosted Exchange, and GoDaddy.com migrated to Microsoft. Alongside all that Hostway released a new shopping cart version, LFC announced the launch of Windows 2003,
HostedToday boosted resources, and Netfirms announced the addition of several advanced features to its "Better Than Dedicated" hosting.
March was also a month of new and enhanced web hosting technologies. MonsterHosting.ca developed what it calls 'Failover' hosting, Comodo offered a free automatic file backup and recovery tool, IntraISP announced IntraISP billing and business management portal, Host Department launched a "Server Stabilization Program", and a new version of the Resellerspanel.com control panel hit the streets.
More and more activity revolved around the Flash tutorials that stop hosting companies' customers ringing them up and pestering them. Flash tutorials provider DemoDemo offered products on a subscription basis, and Template Monster developed Flash 8 web site templates. In the world of domain registration NaviSite announced new sales and management team members and Sibername.com offered pre-registration for '.EU' Domains. In addition, more news about Internet radio did the rounds - Shoutcast streaming services with SCPanel SHOUTcast Control Panel Version 1.3 were on offer and WebStream accepted radio show sponsorship. Fortunately for us, people continued fighting the good fight against spam, DDoS attacks, and Phishing, etc. Open Solutions launched an Internet banking security feature that helps counter Phishing, and Website Source helped guard against DDoS attacks.
Another lively month... it just gets better and better... here's to April's round up (minus the April fools day jokes of course!).
